Colleen Lee: GA failed with SolarBees

Regarding the May 9 editorial “SolarBees fall short”: The Jordan Lake SolarBees don’t work? Who would have “thunk” it? Just about anyone with a lick of common sense. So I guess that leaves out the short-sighted leadership of our General Assembly.

Floating, solar-powered pumps that stir up the algae of Jordan Lake were never going to get rid of that algae continually nourished by upstream runoff pollution. A fifth-grader could probably have told them that.

Yet when a commissioned March 2016 report from a two-year study confirmed these SolarBees don’t work and recommended they be removed, the first reaction was to retract the report, delay its release and water down the final release.

What did we get from this two-year boondoggle of an experiment with SolarBees? We lost $1.3 million in taxpayer money and, even more important, we lost two years of stormwater runoff controls upstream that could have actually improved the water quality in Jordan Lake. At least they are removing the ineffectual SolarBees.